I have a 50mm prime lens that’s really awful at focusing. How do I learn to manually focus for street photography?
Practice and use focus peaking if your camera has it. Also, depth of field can be your friend.
Older cameras and lenses were designed for manual focus. Both in the view finders and in the giant lens focus rings with big rubber grips. Cameras were meant to be used manually before AF came along. It is an unfortunate fact of modern cameras that they are optimized and designed to be used as automatically as possible and only begrudgingly allow manual use anymore. People were good at the lost art of focusing in the manual SLR days because the cameras made it easy and people had plenty of practice at it.
The other problem in play is the modern philosophy of photography where sharpness of focus is seemingly even more important than composition. This is an expected artifact of the availability of finely focusing cameras among people who can’t really take a picture. So here we are.
One thing I like is starting the lens at infinity, or further away than I know the subject is, bringing it up to my eye while starting to rotate the lens to bring the focus closer, so you always know the subject is going to come into focus from further away. This way you don’t have to hunt back and forth, just stop turning it closer when it’s in focus and shoot.
Do in it more often than you have been.
I would just try auto focusing instead. The stigma against auto focus is silly if that’s why you are using manual focus. If it’s the cheap 1.8 canon 50mm then I know how short of a distance that lens has to focus. Will be near impossible to get solid stuff in-focus that quickly and you’ll just lose good photos.
I’ve never seen an AF lens with distance scales that were worth a crap. Especially if you’re trying to do it with a focus-by-wire lens that has no actual physical connection to the elements.
The classic method for street photography was zone focusing anyway, so you’d set your focus distance a certain ways out (or at hyperfocal, so everything beyond a certain line was in focus out to infinity), usually stopped down to increase the plane of focus.